(Also posted to http://wikipedia.com/wiki/user_talk:Marian)
The new "Cologne blue" skin is a tremendous improvement. I think we should eventually make it the default.
A couple of things I would like to change:
* The exclamation marks in front of actions are not necessary and without explanation confuse more than they illuminate.
* The upper right "Log in" should switch to "Log out" if I'm already logged in.
* If the side box is switched off in preferences, we need at a minimum an "edit this page" link somewhere at the bottom. Also, there's currently a bug which displays the page header at the bottom in this case.
* The Wikipedia logo in the page header should be a link to the main page. That seems to be the standard behavior on all sites nowadays. Can we spend the screen real estate to use our current logo?
* "My Settings" should be "My settings", similar to "My watchlist".
* The row in the upper right should contain a link to wikipedia:Help
* In the side box, the Edit section should get the link "Edit this page", in addition to "Upload file". I think that's where people would expect it. The link should go away when editing a page. A link to Editing Help could be added.
* The small font (show diff) should be removed. It looks crappy, and "diff" is not a term that people are familiar with. Just add a new entry "Show last change"
* "All pages" is pretty useless, and expensive on the server, so I think that doesn't need to be on the sidebar.
* "Recent Changes" is not self-explanatory. Maybe "Recently changed pages" is clearer.
* "Myself" should be changed to "My page", because that's what it is.
* Under "Page options", the link should be "Printable version" instead of "Print", because that's what it is.
* The section "Page options" should disappear if there are no Page options that apply to the current page, for instance when editing.
Again, please don't mis-interpret this list of criticisms: I am strongly in favor of "Cologne Blue". A similar list of criticisms for the current scheme would be at least three times as long.
Axel